Completing incomplete cohort fertility schedules

This paper develops a simple age-period-cohort framework in completing incomplete cohort fertility schedules, and makes full use of 1917-2005 U.S. data to obtain robust outcomes. Empirically, we indicate that the period effect is the key to transforming a fertility level into a fertility schedule. Accompanied by the smoothed version of tempo-variance-adjusted total fertility rates proposed in Kohler and Philipov (2001), we approximate the cohort fertility schedules fairly well and the estimates of all distributional parameters can be thereby obtained. Our approach is easy to implement and the data requirement is relatively light, indicating that the proposed method is readily applicable to countries whose data lengths are insufficiently long, and would be helpful for further empirical investigation of the relationship between cohort fertility behavior and other cohort-specific socioeconomic factors.